Posts Tagged "appetite"

Some people are drawn to the thick smell of bacon, sizzling and crackling in the skillet on a Saturday morning. For others, it’s the aroma of freshly baked cookies on a Friday night or the smell of McDonald’s fries creeping in through the car window. At this time of year, I find the scent of [...]

Julianne Wyrick has a bachelor’s in biochemistry and is currently a master’s student in the health and medical journalism program at the University of Georgia, where she also writes about science for the Office of Research Communications. Find her on the web at juliannewyrick.com. Julianne can be found on Twitter as @juliannewyrick.

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. It may not have the cache of winter holidays or the Cash! Yay! of a birthday, but it is the best feel-good holiday of the year. At least it feels that way to me. But why is that? Of all the wonderful annual holidays, why would I prefer a single meal, shared with family, loved ones, and friends? Many of these holidays include similar meals. What makes Thanksgiving different for my brain?

I disagree with this study’s conclusion. It’s not that I don’t believe that low-income is tied to diabetes and hypoglycemia at the end of the pay cycle. I do believe it. But I suspect that these diabetics are eating too much inexpensive high-carbohydrate junk foods at the end of their pay cycle, rather than starving.

Horking down a huge honking burger–American style–is considered unladylike in Japan. So Freshness Burger uses an unconventional approach to maintaining Ochobo–the Japanese cultural practice of maintaining small delicate mouth features in women. They use illusory replacement of the disgusting burger-eating pie-hole with the dainty and ladylike fake ochobo face mask.

Chronic jetlag, habitual night shifts, and rotating shift work, can have deleterious consequences on circadian organization and metabolic health, says a new report in the Annals of the New York Academy of Science. The reason may be the significant crosstalk between the circadian system and the metabolic system, leading to “chronobesity”.

An important and exciting piece of research just came out in Science Magazine last week showing why gastric bypass surgery has such powerful curative effects on diabetes, beyond the previous belief that the dietary restriction helps diabetes.

Is it possible that our vision can affect our taste perception? Let’s review some examples of studies that claim to have demonstrated that sometimes what we see can override what we think we taste. From wine to cheese to soft drinks and more it seems that by playing with the color palette of food one [...]

Dr. Cheryl G. Murphy is an optometrist and freelance science writer who playfully ties the science of sight in with pop culture in order to share her love and fascination of vision science with others. She began writing about vision science on her blog Science Hidden in Plain Sight in 2008. Links to her previous contributions to Scientific American’s guest blog can be found here. Follow her on Facebook or Twitter @murphyod.

Grocery store aisles are awash in foods and beverages that contain high-fructose corn syrup. It is common in sodas and crops up in everything from ketchup to snack bars. This cheap sweetener has been an increasingly popular additive in recent decades and has often been fingered as a driver of the obesity epidemic. These fears [...]

Katherine Harmon Courage is a freelance writer and contributing editor for Scientific American. Her book Octopus! The Most Mysterious Creature In the Sea is out now from Penguin/Current. Katherine can be found on Twitter as @KHCourage.

It doesn’t matter where you look: the U.S., Mexico, Malaysia or Portugal, the more high fructose corn syrup consumption, on average, the more diabetes. A new study of 43 countries in Global Public Health, published online November 27, found that adult type-2 diabetes is 20 percent higher in countries that consume large quantities of high [...]

Katherine Harmon Courage is a freelance writer and contributing editor for Scientific American. Her book Octopus! The Most Mysterious Creature In the Sea is out now from Penguin/Current. Katherine can be found on Twitter as @KHCourage.